By MATT BROWN and MICHELLE L. PRICE, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A longtime close aide to President Joe Biden on Wednesday denounced Republican investigations into the former president as “baseless” in testimony to lawmakers and defended Biden as capable of carrying out his presidential duties “at all times.”

Steve Ricchetti, a senior advisor to Biden during his presidency, wrote in his opening statement to the House Oversight Committee that he was willing to answer lawmakers’ questions about Biden’s mental state while in office despite Republicans’ effort to “intimidate officials who served in the previous administration.”

“I believe it is important to forcefully rebut this false narrative about the Biden presidency and our role in it,” Ricchetti said.

“There was no nefarious conspiracy of any kind among the president’s senior staff, and there was certainly no conspiracy to hide the president’s mental condition from the American people,” wrote Ricchetti, who has served as an aide to Biden since 2012. He said Biden was “fully capable” of carrying out his duties throughout his term.

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Ricchetti’s testimony comes after weeks of appearances from former Biden aides as House Republicans seek to build their investigation, which is central to their oversight agenda as they seek to turn the spotlight back to the last administration.

Some former staffers, including Biden’s physician, Kevin O’Connor, and Anthony Bernal, a top aide to former first lady Jill Biden, invoked their Fifth Amendment rights and declined to answer questions from the committee. Others, including former White House chief of staff Ron Klain and Neera Tanden, former director of the Domestic Policy Council, have answered the committee’s questions at length.

The committee will hear from seven more senior Biden staffers in the coming weeks.

The Trump White House has launched its own inquiry into Biden. In June, Trump issued an executive order that argued there were “clear indications” that Biden “lacked the capacity to exercise his presidential authority” and ordered an investigation into “whether certain individuals conspired to deceive the public about Biden’s mental state and unconstitutionally exercise the authorities and responsibilities of the president.”

Ricchetti argued the Republican-led inquiries were “an obvious attempt to deflect from the chaos of this administration’s first six months.” He contrasted it with what he said were Biden’s accomplishments on issues like infrastructure, inflation, climate policy and the coronavirus response.

“I firmly believe that at all times during my four years in the White House, President Biden was fulfilling his constitutional duties. Did he stumble? Occasionally. Make mistakes? Get up on the wrong side of the bed? He did — we all did. But I always believed — every day — that he had the capability, character, and judgment to be President of the United States,” Ricchetti said.

At the heart of the Republican probe is a legal dispute over the Biden White House’s use of the autopen, a device used in all presidential administrations to issue the president’s signature for laws and executive orders. Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration allege, without evidence, that Biden was not in a cogent state of mind for much of his presidency and that many policies enacted during his time in office may consequently be illegal.

Biden has called Trump and House Republicans “liars” for the claim and said he “made every single one” of the decisions in office that involved an autopen. Biden’s aides are now echoing that sentiment directly to the committee.

Republicans are still eager to highlight Biden’s various gaffes as a political cudgel against Democrats.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have largely dismissed House Republicans’ probe as a distraction from the Trump administration’s agenda. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat who sits on the House Oversight Committee, said Republicans in the probe “look like losers” after she exited the deposition for Anthony Bernal, the former chief of staff to Jill Biden.

Longtime Minnesota Orchestra board member Nancy E. Lindahl has stepped down from her position as the chair and, with her husband John, gave a $15 million gift to the orchestra on her way out.

The news was shared Tuesday at the orchestra’s final board meeting of the 2024-25 season. In honor of Lindahl, the performance auditorium inside Orchestra Hall will be renamed the Lindahl Auditorium starting this fall.

The board also elected William P. Miller as incoming chair and a slate of new board directors.

“The Minnesota Orchestra has meant the world to me since I was a child attending orchestra concerts at Northrop Auditorium with my parents,” Lindahl said in a news release. “The orchestra contributes immensely to our state through high-caliber musicianship, music education and community partnerships, and we want to keep this cultural touchstone strong and vital.”

Lindahl joined the board in 1998, was named a life director in 2016 and was elected board chair in January 2023. She led the organization through major artistic and administrative transitions, including the arrival of Thomas Søndergård as music director and the announcement of Isaac Thompson as incoming president and CEO.

Next month, Miller will begin a two-year term as chair. He joined the orchestra board in 2016 and has served in multiple roles, including as chair of the audit committee, treasurer and vice chair. The newly elected class of board members are Adam Duininck, Laurie Greeno, John Junek, Clay Rudolph, Breia Schleuss, Katie Simpson, Mimi Stake, Walter Tambor, Amy J. Braford Whittey and Aks Zaheer.

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A pandemic-era program aimed to facilitate hotel and office to affordable housing conversions. After a slow start, and numerous financing and design challenges, its first project is opening in Queens.

A studio unit at Baisley Pond Park Residences—formerly the JFK Hilton hotel—which will open as a permanently affordable apartment building this fall. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

356 hotel rooms, double-loaded corridors, precast plank and concrete walls, a glass-enclosed pool, sheetrock walls, ribbon glass windows. These were the building blocks of the JFK Hilton Hotel, built in 1987, that operated for 35 years until it closed in 2023.

Architects cut, molded, and reconfigured those pieces to turn that behemoth structure into 318 affordable homes. Hundreds of formerly-homeless residents will move in this fall.

The completion of construction earlier this month makes the development, called Baisley Pond Park, the first project to open using the Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act (HONDA), a 2021 New York State law that financed the conversion of underutilized office and hotel space for affordable and supportive housing.

The incentives proved complicated to use, given the financial, architectural, and policy challenges involved with conversion projects. The Baisley Pond Park Project, built by a nonprofit and a developer in collaboration with multiple city agencies, cobbled together an innovative financing package from public and private sources.

More than half of residents—60 percent—will be formerly homeless families moving out of shelter, leveraging a development incentive from the Department of Social Services that helps pay rent in new affordable units by leasing up city voucher holders.

“We cracked the code on how to convert a hotel into a low income apartment building. It’s just a matter of getting the building at the right price,” said project architect Ariel Aufgang.

Baisley Pond Park Residences, in its infancy when the pandemic-era development incentives were made law, has emerged into a radically different market for hotels. But developers and architects hope that it demonstrates the potential of conversions at a time of a severe housing shortage, particularly for homes affordable to the lowest income New Yorkers.

An architectural jigsaw

There are a lot of rules when building housing. An affordable development like this needed legal amounts of light and air, larger bathrooms accessible to someone in a wheelchair, four burner stoves, full size refrigerators, and sinks.

The exterior of the Baisley Pond Park Residences. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

Those necessities meant trading off living space in already-small hotel rooms. But the building had just enough natural advantages to make all those pieces work.

Hotels tend to be better suited than offices when converting to housing: they meet the legal requirements for light and windows in every room and hallways with rooms on each side—floor plans thin enough for so-called “double-loaded” corridors.

The bathrooms were already in the right place. While developers replaced aging parts of the plumbing, the shafts carrying water up to the rooms would be usable for a bigger bathroom. And crucially, the bathrooms were in the right orientation: flat against the wall abutting the hallway.

A four foot corridor into the common space, opposed to three and a half, could change all the math.

“If you have a hotel that has the bathrooms oriented parallel to the hallway and you’re really tight between one bathroom and the next room’s bathroom, you might not get the space you need for an acceptable door,” described Aufgang.  

A blueprint of the hotel-turned-housing plan. (Courtesy of Aufgang Architects)

It lent the room just enough width to convert into an apartment. A skinnier hotel room would have made the project impossible; the walls separating rooms were structural—they couldn’t be taken down to combine rooms.

The majority of the 318 rooms are studios—practical for converting from one and two bed hotel rooms—but also symmetrical with the building’s future tenants, formerly homeless individuals who are often single adults.

The building also has 33 one-bedroom and 10 two-bedroom units that wrap the corners and stitch together multiple single hotel rooms. With razor-thin margins to make affordable housing projects pencil out, some of the design is meticulous cost control, with each room slightly different. 

“It’s just going space by space, room by room,” Aufgang said. “How do I make the doors big enough? How to make the bathrooms big enough? How do we try to reuse the shafts to save money, reusing the windows to save money?”

After putting in full kitchenettes and ventilation, squeezed tight behind expanded bathrooms, there wasn’t a ton of living space left, especially in the studios, but enough for a bed and some furniture.

The interior of a one-bedroom apartment at Baisley Pond Park Residences. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

“The living spaces are small. There’s no question,” said Aufgang. He said that small apartments were the product of the building’s existing design, accessibility and habitability requirements. 

But cost also drives design, especially in a city where building affordable housing is often prohibitively expensive.

“The answer seems to have been for the past few years to that, to try to solve the housing crisis, to keep making units smaller,” said Aufgang.

“I believe that everyone should have an amply sized apartment for their family size,” he continued. “There’s a crisis and people are on the street, right? If, in order to solve that problem, we first have to make buildings with 274 studio apartments that are the size of a hotel room, I think that’s a way to house our neighbors with dignity.” 

Location, location, location

Tucked between two other hotels, the Baisley Pond Park building sits on an odd plot of land. Penned in on two sides by the Belt Parkway and the Van Wyck Expressway, it leans over highway and gazes over blocks and blocks of postage-stamp single family homes in South Jamaica.

The view from Baisley Pond Park Residences overlooking Jamaica, Queens. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

The location has its pros and cons. It’s a bit remote. It’s mostly served by just one bus line, the Q40, with the nearest subway and commuter rail line at Jamaica Center, 2.7 miles to the north.

“It’s not a neighborhood where we’ve provided services before,” said Emily Kurtz, chief housing officer at RiseBoro, the nonprofit that will own and operate the site. But the scale of the project was attractive, Kurtz said, and meant they could more efficiently serve clients there.

So they invested in services on site, converting the building’s generous lobby and event space into a place to provide light-touch services to individuals and families living there.

A hotel restaurant became community rooms. The glass enclosed pool became an indoor garden, and the industrial kitchen was leased to Meals on Wheels. Hotel offices became headquarters for RiseBoro’s support services.

RiseBoro says it will add a shuttle service to transport residents from the facility to the Jamaica transit hub.

A former swimming pool area transformed into a community green space at Baisley Pond Park Residences. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

“It’s challenging because, you know, cost is a problem,” said David Schwartz, founder of Slate Property Group, the project’s developer. “We want to have a lot of affordable housing in transit rich neighborhoods and areas that have lots of infrastructure.” 

“We have to take every opportunity to create units of affordable housing,” said Kurtz.

A spot a bit further out meant a lower purchase price that could facilitate the construction and conversion.

“We walked and looked at, you know, probably 100 to 200 hotels,” said Schwartz.

“It had to be large enough, the rooms had to be big enough to plug the [building code], the zoning had to work, the price had to work,” he said.

Those particulars, and complicated financing, were part of the reason the HONDA program got off to a slow start. One year after the program launched, New York Focus reported that it hadn’t dispersed any funds or started any projects. 

Then, later in 2022, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a law that lifted some of those onerous zoning restrictions, and permitted hotels within 400 feet of a residential district, plus those accessing HONDA funds, to be permanent residences.

Still, a now-booming hotel market in New York means the prospects for converting future sites could be slimming.

“A hotel is a little bit easier to convert than a commercial space into residences because the buildings tend to be double loaded,” said Aufgang, meaning they have rooms on both sides of a central hallway. “Sometimes buildings are just obsolete. So there’s just not enough you can do to make it worth it.”

Construction continues adjacent to Baisley Pond Park Residences, formerly the JFK Hilton. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

A financial stack

One advantage of conversion: when the pieces do fit, you can do it faster.

“Our typical projects take 36 months just to do pre-development and then 24 to 36 months development, and this one was much shorter,” said Kurtz.

Part of that pre-development process is assembling the financing. For an affordable project like Baisley Pond Park, that means a complicated assortment of funding sources, factoring in equity from a developer, public subsidy, bonds, and ongoing operations. Developers call that delicate scaffolding of financing the “capital stack.”

Baisley Pond’s “stack” needed to add up to $167 million. They got a $50 million loan from the city’s Housing Development Corporation (HDC). They received another $48 million in HONDA funding. Usually, affordable projects use the go-to tool for building affordable housing in the United States: the Low Income Tax Credit. But that wasn’t going to work for a project and a program meant to serve New Yorkers fast.

The former hotel when it was still under construction. (Photo courtesy of Slate Property Group)

“New York’s got a waiting list of five, six or seven years for low income housing tax credits,” said Schwartz. 

Instead, since RiseBoro was going to own the project (often, affordable buildings are owned by developers and run and managed by nonprofits), the project was able to access bonds specifically for 501c3 nonprofits from HDC.

The ongoing operations of the site would be funded through the city’s Affordable Housing Services program, which fast tracks contracting and uses the future rent from city housing voucher holders in the building to fund operations.

The project took a perfect balance of the right building, the right program, and the right timing to come to fruition.

But developers, architects, and nonprofit operators hope that both the financing and the design and construction can be an example for future conversions.

“New York is complicated for construction,” added Aufgang. “You need time. 21 months is miraculous.”

The New York State Department of Homes and Community Renewal, which oversees the HONDA program, did not elaborate on how many projects may be in the HONDA pipeline. But it mentioned the completed JFK Hilton conversion and a Quality Inn conversion it funded in Ulster, New York.

“HCR continues to work closely with nonprofit partners throughout the state who are seeking to convert distressed hotels and underutilized commercial buildings to the safe, modern, and affordable housing New Yorkers need,” said a spokesperson for the agency in a statement.

“I think you can use this as a model,” said Schwartz. “Once you do it, I do think that this is a model that can be replicated.”

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Patrick@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post ‘We Cracked The Code’: First Hotel-to-Housing Conversion Using State Program To Open in Queens appeared first on City Limits.

MODESTO, Calif. (AP) — Energy drinks that mistakenly contain vodka are being recalled in half a dozen states.

High Noon is recalling two production lots of High Noon Beach Variety packs because some packs include cans containing vodka that were mislabeled as Celsius Astro Vibe Energy Drink, according to a U.S. Food and Drug Administration recall notice Wednesday.

The cans contain vodka seltzer and were mislabeled as “sparkling blue razz”-flavored Celsius Astro Vibe energy drinks, the notice said.

Consumption of the liquid in the cans will result in “unintentional alcohol ingestion,” the company said.

The packs were distributed to retailers in Florida, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The recall was initiated after the company discovered that a shared packaging supplier mistakenly shipped empty Celsius energy drink cans to High Noon.

No illnesses or adverse events have been reported related to the labeling error, according to the company.

Consumers who purchased the beverages with the impacted codes found in the recall notice should dispose of it, the notice said.

Consumers are also encouraged to make sure any Sparkling Blue Razz Celsius Astro Vibe energy drinks do not contain the specific lot codes in the notice before drinking them.